Second Cream Cake: [Action/Written]

[vor]

It’s a bad night.

Gregor hasn’t slept. The boredom in this place leaves him too much time to think, and his thoughts revolve around what he learned on Komarr. Alone at night, wondering when his genes will start generating monsters in his head. Prince Serg, the longed-for father, the hero of the last generation, also a sadist who tortured pregnant women. Great Uncle Yuri, Mad Emperor Yuri, slaughterer of almost all his relatives. Ezar, who married his own cousin, Yuri’s sister, and produced Serg. Genes doubled and redoubled, madness folded over itself and compressed into Gregor’s own flesh, sleeping, latent. When will it raise its head?

He wishes and doesn’t wish for Aral Vorkosigan, Prime Minister and Puppet Master, foster-father and cousin, former regent and perpetual mentor. Aral would have answers, but Aral is the last person Gregor wants to hear them from. Aral led the retreat from Escobar after Serg’s death, then taken his place in the Imperium and at home until Gregor reached his majority. The truth about Serg can’t be heard from many others. Why has it never been revealed to him? Why didn’t they warn him of this latent threat? Did they think he would go mad simply from the revelation?

I am glass. Drop me and break me.

He finds himself leaning out the third-story window and wondering if it’s high enough. It’s the thought of Cordelia that makes him back away and close the window after several minutes of leaning. Cordelia, wrapping a protective arm around him after he lit his mother’s funeral offering.

Are they going to kill me, too?

No. I won’t let them.

Cordelia was far more a mother to him than Aral was a father. Still, unlike with Serg, Gregor remembers Kareen. She was murdered when he was five, but he still remembers her, maybe because his subconscious has to hold on to all the memories of his mother that it can. Cordelia had been her friend. Cordelia had tried to save her. Cordelia had taken care of her son. But he still remembers a time when someone else was his mother. He still knows he can’t compete with Cordelia’s actual son.

All the same, she might be the only person who loves him for himself. To her Betan mind, all these formal titles are sort of an optical illusion. And she’d be the first to point out that pitching himself over the side would only make him wake up a week later with his life even more in shambles than before. It doesn’t make him stop wanting to test whether or not he’d really come back, if even that escape is closed to him.

He pries himself away from the window. He should go do something else. Not get drunk, because that would make it worse. But it’s three in the morning and there’s not much else to do except wait till dawn. And that’s what he does, curled on his side on the couch, until the sky begins to lighten and he finally falls asleep.

He dreams about Serg melting the skin off one side of Captain Negri’s body with a plasma arc, mouth open with pleasure.

[He wakes up early in the afternoon and doesn’t feel better until after he’s taken a shower. It takes a lot of motivation to go outside at all. He spends a little time in the stables just to remember the smell of horses even if there aren’t any that belong to him. Riding. That’s the only thing he can think of that’s worth going outside for, and he can’t do it.

He tries the library. Barrayaran history won’t hold any answers about Serg, so maybe Escobaran. He doesn’t find Escobaran history. He does, however, find some psychology books that he winds up taking with him to the tea shop on a whim. There, he sits and sips his cuppa while devouring one book about mental illness by a supposedly distinguished author. There’s comfort in looking at it from a curable, clinical perspective. Most of the actual content matter he’s already learned at Cordelia’s knee.

Feeling like he’s doing something helps. He starts to look up more information about missions. He wants at least one horse, dammit, and the currency here seems to be these points earned by doing favors for the Malnosso. Maybe during a research mission, he could even learn something about what happened at Escobar.

He has a plan. Horse, psychology, and Escobar. And after the first horse? Maybe another. Maybe he’ll fill the stables so people can travel more easily within the enclosure. It would be good to have horses around. Maybe he could take up a career as a groom. Ma and Da (Illyan and Aral) would have conniptions. Cordelia would say it’s good for him.

He writes:]

Would anyone ride horses if we had them?

Also: I would like to speak with anyone who has died here and come back, if anyone would be willing to speak of it.

-GVB

Comments

[fleurdesel]

As opposed to an unwritten constitution? I'm curious as to the governance of humanity's future. Especially since so many forms of government seem terribly broken in my time.

[vor]

Just my planet, remember. The spoken word on Barrayar is as important as the written. As for governments, I doubt there's ever been an unbroken system in the history of humanity.

[fleurdesel]

It is more than I would know otherwise, even if it is of only your planet.

[She lifts a shoulder.]

It sounds like a system which may be more focused on honor and intent than those I know.

[vor]

Honor, yes. [Looking a little glum. Running away had been such a bad idea, although he's now realized that the stunt had nothing to do with landing him here.] Honor is important, on Barrayar. All tied up in military service.

[fleurdesel]

Is it required of every citizen?

[That did. Sound somewhat familiar. Either in history or actuality in her time, required military service for every member of society.]

[vor]

No. [A pause. This appears to be a tough question.] No. Not legally. It's just...essential, to us. Risk in service. Insisted upon, usually, for the upper class, but not forced.

[fleurdesel]

To abstain is frowned upon, yes? [Upper class- officers. Most likely. It wouldn't hurt to ask.]

Does the station one comes from dictate military rank?

[vor]

Not anymore.

[fleurdesel]

Conflict arose from the practice?

[vor]

It's been a long time since then. I don't think I was born yet.

[fleurdesel]

And no records were kept- or no one wishes to discuss it.

[vor]

No, records were kept. People talk about it sometimes. My childhood...friend is married to a man who was in that first generation. Plebes who achieved rank.

[fleurdesel]

[The hesitation is noted, but not remarked upon. She doesn't know him well enough to ask, after all.]

It must have caused quite a stir.

[vor]

[Drou was his childhood friend. Slash bodyguard. But he's not about to explain the bodyguard part. He did dance with her at her wedding, though. When he was five.]

With Koudelka, you mean? Not in particular. He had a bad assignment from the start, probably because of his class. But stirs about such things by necessity must remain...somewhat muted. All military officers make their oaths to the one Emperor, so infighting is not encouraged.

[fleurdesel]

It doesn't look good to those they lead for the officers to fight amongst themselves, no matter the military or the decade, yes? I do not suppose that you've the same media sensationalism present in my own time.

[vor]

Some towns don't have comconsoles. Or...electricity.

[Something he's tried to do something about, but so much depends on the district Counts for that kind of thing.]

[fleurdesel]

When you say some...how many, roughly, would you mean?

[vor]

Most of the small countryside towns.

[Where infanticide is still practiced, despite it being illegal now, for babies with visible mutations.]

[fleurdesel]

...is the settlement on your planet a new one"

[vor]

No. It's complicated. [He glances at Adele, not quite sure how interested she is in hearing Barrayaran history. She's been interested so far...]

Barrayar was settled about eight hundred years ago. There were about fifty thousand original settlers, and their equipment was limited to the basics. Whatever they needed to live and start terraforming, mostly. Then the wormhole that brought them there vanished. The planet was only rediscovered by the rest of the galaxy about a century ago. I think the greatest technological advancement we had by then was gunpowder.

[fleurdesel]

[Above all else, she's curious. About this world and those she meets here, the history of their own worlds. Her current research has been forgotten almost entirely in favor of this discussion.]

Reestablishing contact and bringing the settlers back up to speed will take a long while yet, then...but was there no record of where the planet was before contact was lost?

[vor]

Oh, technology was re-adopted very quickly. It's...other matters that are taking time. Moral and political. We may be the only truly feudal system of government in the galaxy. Everyone else sees us as somewhat barbaric.

[fleurdesel]

Feudal governments are considered antiquated and inefficient in my time, Monsieur. I cannot think they would be thought of any better so very far in the future. I think the only thing frowned upon more is a theocratic system of government.

[vor]

Your opinion is shared by practically every other planet in the galaxy, Madam. For us, it works. At this point in our development, I'm not sure anything else would. In another century or so, perhaps.

[fleurdesel]

If it works, then. It works. It's not my place to say, really. Not my time, not my world, and not by a very large margin. But thank you for indulging my curiosity, Monsieur...?